


quid pro quo

by gracelesso, silentwalrus



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Vampire, First Time But Not Like That, Humor, M/M, because why have vampires OR modern au OR alchemy when you can have all three, everybody still has alchemy, succ
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:27:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25478413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracelesso/pseuds/gracelesso, https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: Roy - thanks to a series of events going exponentially FUBAR - is in Dazhen. He wasn’t due back for another three months, but given that he wasn’t supposed to become a fucking vampire for another eighteen or so either, it’s safe to say that scheduling concerns are not his first priority.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 208
Kudos: 571





	1. no dinner plans

**Author's Note:**

> so i (chad) lost my mind a couple months ago, dreamed a confusing fma vampire au and made the mistake of sharing these fevered bullshits with gracelesso, who then further wronged the universe by convincing me the concept has legs. so now here we are. A FMA modern day vampire au. Don’t think too hard about it; we certainly aren’t.
> 
> thanks to aetataureate and galwednesday for beta!!

Roy - thanks to a series of events going exponentially FUBAR - is in Dazhen. He wasn’t due back for another three months, but given that he wasn’t supposed to become a fucking vampire for another eighteen or so either, it’s safe to say that scheduling concerns are not his first priority. 

It’s not the end of the world. It’s not exactly how Roy expected or planned or in any way _wanted_ things to go, but go they did, and if viewed from the strategic, eagle-eye perspective, Frank Archer merely expedited the timeline. Viewed from the perspective of Roy sitting in a wall-to-wall marble and glass bathroom in some two thousand a night corporate Anhe shithole, dabbing the last of the bloodspatter out of his favorite tie and trying not to flinch from the lights, it is _extremely un-fucking-great._

Things could be worse. He took the ferry from Zhejiang looking no more sweaty and unhinged than any other besuited tourist or truant businessman, walked the four blocks from the waterfront to the hotel he usually stays at when he’s in town, paid with his corporate card. It won’t look unusual, not in the paperwork, not in the flesh: on the security feeds it’ll just be him, exactly as damp and disheveled as he would be, just from passing through the muggy, monsoon-June night. 

He needs to call Riza. He needs to call Chris, who lives right across the bay and won’t appreciate him occupying the same hemisphere without at least dropping a text. He’ll have to go see her either way: they all knew this was going to happen eventually, but for it to happen _now,_ like this, means there’s damage control on the agenda, and far more of it than he can do alone. Besides, they have a standing policy on Roy informing her when he actually commits murder. 

Right now, though, his cellphone is at the bottom of the bay between Zhejiang and Dazhen. He asked the hotel for a new one, but whatever runner they sent to the nearest Apple store must not be back yet, since they’d called and said it’d come up with the room service. Roy isn’t using the hotel phone to contact anyone but the front desk. A brand new phone bought by a stranger is going to be the best he can do, for current opsec. 

He doesn’t have any luggage either, but that’s because when Archer invited him on the Zhejiang day trip for a couple of less-formal meetings with their southern Xingese partners he thought he’d be back in his Dadu condo by midnight. He definitely didn’t think he’d be slapping at the damn hotel bathroom’s million fucking dimmer switches, trying to find a setting that will let him identify all the blood spots on his tie without heaping on another helping of migraine. He’s still thinking clearly - thank fuck - but his head is killing him and his body feels like it might turn inside out if he sneezes hard. This is the worst hangover he’s ever had and he hasn’t even gotten to drink yet. He’d do something about hair of the dog, but - 

Well. It’s not alcohol he’s after. 

It’s not like hunger. Not like thirst. It feels - psychological, in a way the word doesn’t feel big enough to describe. Not deep enough. The thought that keeps coming up - as Roy examines his blown pupils in the mirror, his aching mouth, his as-yet-unsplit gums - is _carnal._

The bite is just under his collar, just barely hidden beneath his shirt. It'd stopped bleeding almost immediately, but the damage, as it were, was all internal. Archer hadn’t bothered to restrain Roy in any way, because from what he’d heard him brag - through the wavering, molten-glass haze of his body turning, his instincts rewriting themselves - he was an old hand at dealing with baby vamps’ first blood frenzies. That may well have been true, but what he wasn’t ready for was Roy abandoning the newly-formed urge to rend and leap in favor of the much more familiar, much more practiced urge to fumble his gloves out of his inner jacket pocket and snap. 

Three cheers for Amestrisan military discipline. 

Roy’d never had to do corpse disposal by himself before, but he managed. The suite they’d been in was much glitzier than this one - Zhejiang’s casino territory after all, he’s pretty sure they fine hotels if their gold leaf and chandelier quota isn’t up to par - so the bathroom windows opened and the tub was more than big enough for a crematory run. He has a few hours still until Archer and his associates are even considered missing, and what the hotel staff will find in the room is not going to immediately point to foul play. Roy was the only one who had bled, after all, and mostly down into his own collar. Lucky, to have worn all black this morning, shirt to linen jacket to gossamer-weave tie. 

As for the question of his own presence, let alone culpability - well. He wasn’t exactly supposed to be there in the first place, had only been invited in passing, and since it turned out that Archer planned to turn him all along it was unlikely he would’ve shared that Roy was with him in any official capacity. And unofficially, Archer and his allies were already gunning for Roy anyway. 

Riza is well aware that they have - well, had - no friend in Archer, but she does need to know Archer’s moved against them, and intended to absorb Roy’s entire faction in one fell stroke. Likely to preempt another player from doing the same, come to think of it. Which makes Archer either rash or better-informed than Roy is, because to his own knowledge everyone relevant still assumes the prior claim on his siring is Olivier Armstrong’s, and as of yet no one has tried to either negotiate for him or oust her. They’d played his turning as up in the air intentionally: everyone knows Olivier despises Roy, after all. And that opened the door to the possibility that she’d trade him away, if only the replacing bargain struck were sweet enough. 

That he _would_ turn was never in question. In roughly eighteen months Roy is due for a promotion, and in the circles he’s levered himself into, making managing partner of a certain kind of firm means joining a club a little more exclusive than the directors’ golf games. Now that he _is_ turned - turning - well. With Archer disappeared and Roy sireless, it won’t be long at all before it’s obvious what happened - and that no existing vampire faction has him under their control. 

There’s a knock at the door. Two steps from the keyhole Roy knows it’s only one person, male, young, heartbeat strong, wreathed in sweat and hair gel, salt and fat and raw meat. Roy doesn’t dare inhale again, but he can’t shut off his hearing, so he runs to the numbers, forces himself to project the likely cost of the meal, calculate an exact tip as he opens the door. He turns away from the boy, makes a production out of finding his wallet, says what must be the appropriate things while trying his damnedest not to breathe. 

He stands at the door too long after it closes, lungs heaving in, chasing the flickers of live warmth. Of what his senses are saying is a feast, just steps out of reach. The food in the room - cold beer, salad, steak tartare - might as well be gravel. Vampires _do_ eat, he knows that much, but probably not… now. He’s not sure what the timeline is, for newly turned vamps and blood. He was supposed to have months more to do the research. 

He didn’t drink from Archer, didn’t drink from the other two with him, vampires all. If drink is even the right word. Eat. Feed. Roy’s aware vampires feed from each other, to bind each other and to bond, but he’s glad that between the situation’s necessary urgency and the stench of burnt hair and tailored menswear nothing in that room had come across as even remotely edible. 

Roy backs into the bathroom and starts filling the sink, water cold as it can go. Killing his sire was always going to be inevitable, too. No matter who it would’ve ended up being, someone having a biological level of control over him would’ve been too dangerous to allow. 

Sticking his face in the water does not actually help, though it does make his ears ring and ruins the structural integrity of his hair gel. Not being able to smell anything doesn’t erase the knowledge of what he _did_ smell: hot, moving, alive, alive, alive. 

He’s still underwater when he remembers the phone, the neat packaged rectangle next to the unappetizing food. He gets the prepaid SIM card out of its plastic shell and into the phone with his face still dripping, letting the activation run. His hands don’t shake, but then he supposes they wouldn’t: the sharpened senses, the coiled tension, it’s all to propel him in his first hunt, help his first kill succeed. Wobbly, disoriented predators don’t eat well. The fact that he feels shakier by the minute is all internal, entirely in his head. 

He _should_ go to Chris. He would, except he knows Maddy is staying there this whole summer with Great-Auntie Rong and all three kids, and it would instantly become a hysterical circus involving at least two neighbors and whatever boyfriend of Auntie’s is hanging around. Besides, he _does_ have the company card. In a hotel full of rich people you can keep secrets; in a three-room apartment with nine family members you cannot. 

Also, he will almost certainly try to bite them, and he’s not ready to lose teeth just yet to a wide-swung LV handbag containing enough hard-edged makeup to give him a skull fracture. 

He doesn’t _look_ too… off, if what the dresser mirror’s giving him is accurate, but the restlessness is growing. He paces across the suite, takes his jacket off, opens a window: doesn’t help. He remembers the phone again, looks down at his hand as if he expects it to still be there and not on the bed where he’d left it, and grimly notes that the thinking clearly is not so much happening anymore. 

He needs to get outside. Get to people - no. To air. Sea air, wipe out the smells, let him make some calls in peace. In privacy. Outside, where he’s nameless and nobody and there’s no chance of anyone listening at his room’s phone line, at his door. 

There’ll be a video record of all the entrances, but right now what he needs most is to not be near any hu - people. He’ll go out the back corridors, down the freight elevators. Maddy was a cleaner for years, she’s told him plenty of stories, he _knows_ there’re back ways out of here. All he needs is to go out in his undershirt and slacks and look like he’s off to have a smoke. 

He can do this. He can call Riza; he can get to the sea. If things gets _really_ bad, well - he’s done worse than spend a night under an Anhe dock pier, hugging some barnacle-encrusted pilon and huffing tide stink to drown out the call for blood. It’ll be fine. Come morning it’ll either be Chris with a live pig or Riza with a tranq gun and a transfusion packet, and all he has to do is make it down.

-0- 

Four blocks away, in the dark of a night-stilled construction site, blue light cracks the air in half, spitting and twisting like a maddened cat. It’s not big, not very loud; at least not to human senses. If measured in energy expenditure, however, it would be a rather different story. 

It only lasts a second before snapping shut. Any casual observer would be left doubting they’d seen anything at all, though of course anyone consulting the relevant radiometric profile would have a succession of heart attacks. In the grand scheme of things, the crackling alchemic rift was a nigh on unprecedented phenomenon, a live impossibility, a split in spacetime itself; in comparison, the two ragged shapes that fall out of it aren’t much more than an afterthought. 

“Ow,” says one voice. 

_“Fuck,”_ says the other. Then, “Al!”

Then, “Where the fuck is this?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ch title from swalla by jason derulo bc of who i am as a person


	2. bring all your friends

The good news is, Ed gets Al’s body back, with a right arm thrown in gratis to boot. The bad news - insofar as anything can be bad when Al is right there, doing amazingly corporeal things like coughing and swearing and bleeding - is that Ed has no fucking clue where they ended up. The initial transmutation was in Central, sure, but this is - extremely not there. It’s not even daytime here. 

Once they get past the _it worked? It worked!!_ and Ed’s completely sure that Al’s bleeding isn’t anything major, just some scraped hands - hands! - and bruised knees - knees! - and a bitten tongue from a brutally abrupt landing in what appears to be an underpass, Ed looks around. They’re surrounded on both sides by - he squints at the looming shapes, the uneven ground - a construction site. The air’s soup-thick, sweat already suctioning his leather pants to his inner thighs like wallpaper paste and causing Al’s long hair to stick to his bare back. Because he’s super fucking naked. Ed drags his hair tie out of his braid and pings it at him - grinning at the weak _hey!_ \- and then hoists himself up the side of the underpass.

This immediately puts him face to face with the fact that he’s _got his arm,_ mostly by way of searing pain when he climbs over a construction roadblock and tries to put his weight on it. It’s alternately hot and numb in places all down his side, on top of being weak, shaky and actively oozing at the shoulder. Whatever that Truth fuck did to reattach it wasn’t exactly precision surgery. It hurts like a motherfucker, and while it’s very much - _ow -_ on him, he’s pretty sure it’s not actually held on by any kind of, like, connective tissue. Compared to his automail it’s pretty much the direct polar opposite on the durability scale. He’s gonna have to find himself a sling or something. 

But climbing one-handed isn’t _that_ big of a deal, and he topples himself over the top railing and immediately puts his mortality to the test for the second time in under an hour as a red and white taxi screams over the bridge with enough pace to whip his newly-loose hair stickily across his face. He only yells _fuck_ a little bit as he beats a minor retreat to the top of the railing, this time grabbing on tight and pasting himself to the edge as he looks about for clues as to where the fuck they've been spat out. 

The bridge is an eight-lane highway curving across the city and down towards a stretch of glinting blackness that's definitely water of some kind. There's a cluster of blue road signs at the far end of it, presumably indicating directions and lanes in what looks like Xingese glyphs, which Ed definitely cannot read. The signs _do_ have words in what he recognizes as their phonetic script underneath the characters, which he _can_ read, a little, and this would be totally helpful except for the fact that “road” and “street” are the only things on there that fucking mean anything to him. There’s a sign for what’s gotta be an airport, but it doesn’t say _which_ airport - just a big white plane. 

It feels like a pretty safe bet that they’ve landed somewhere in Xing, but Xing is a big fucking place and other than knowing the capital is vaguely north somewhere he doesn’t have a clue about the geography. Between the airport sign, the massive highway and the distant busy sounds it feels like a pretty big city, but it certainly doesn’t feel _north_. The air feels like it’s slowly coating him in hot oatmeal. 

Ed gives up on the signs and starts to take in the lay of the land, because in the most immediate sense it doesn't really matter where they are. It's not Central, it's not Amestris, and they're not gonna be heading home tonight. And that means there's some stuff they're gonna need. Clothes, for a start. Al's completely naked and Ed's outfit took a beating of its own. Food. Somewhere to sleep, and while Ed would be perfectly okay just to hunker down in a dry corner, Al's not weather-resistant anymore. They did not go through all fucking _that_ just for Al to get malaria from sleeping in a ditch. Wherever the hell this is, there's got to be someplace nearby they can crash.

Ed's phone did not survive interdimensional transit - in fact he’s pretty sure it departed his back pocket even before he transmuted himself and Al into a spacewarp - so if this _is_ Xing he can't just text Ling and ask for clothes and food and showers with a side of diplomatic immunity. Not that Ling would be in Xing right now anyway; _he’s_ back in Amestris, possibly an entire hemisphere away from here, depending on if that water in the distance is ocean or not. The land below and around the bridge is mostly dark apart from the seam of the road cutting over it, but above it everything is garishly bright. Out towards the water there's a low, swooping shape picked out in twinkling halogen bulbs, and above it, a forest of high rises. 

Somebody honks at him, which reminds him that even though he’s on a raised strip at the side of the road where he’s got every right to be, he, well. Technically doesn’t have any right to be there, seeing as he didn’t so much legally cross the border as get horked up here by god. Also - as headlights sleet over him, lighting him up halogen-bright - he sees his right arm is pretty much just _blood_ from the shoulder down, which will probably turn out to be an improvement on metal over time, but isn’t immediately less eye-catching in a public place. 

Time to go. He scrambles back over the barrier with a quick curse for his bloody, slippery hand and its weak grip, heading back to Al - who on the one hand still looks like _Al_ , which is a miracle in its own right, but on the other hand is still sitting in the dirt, hair only marginally out of his face, and starting to look distinctly peaky. 

“Well?” Al croaks impatiently, then coughs. Peaky _and_ cranky, okay. Justified, since he spent the past eight years not eating or breathing or having to take a shit and now probably has to do all those things. “Where are we?” 

“Well, I think we’re in Xing,” Ed says. “Maybe the capital? I dunno. But it’s a city, there’s like, stuff. We can get food and things.” 

Al gives him a very patient look, which somehow looks exactly like it did on both his metal and nine year old faces. “How.” 

“We’ve transmuted money _before -”_

“Start with clothes,” Al says, then, when Ed glances down at himself speculatively, “Do _not_ transmute me boxers out of your horrible blood shirt, Ed, I swear to god.” 

Ed grins a little sheepishly and starts looking around for a tarp or a discarded safety vest or something. His coat, which isn’t so much a coat anymore as a heap of damp rags, is the best he can manage. At least it’d cover the essentials. 

He’s on the point of clapping when Al suddenly inhales and goes, “Waitwaitwait stop!”

Ed stops, because Al sounded genuinely kinda concerned there, and not in the ‘don’t make me wear a tunic you made out of your grotty jacket, think of my pride’ way. “No alchemy,” Al says firmly.

Ed stares. Al sets his chin. “The last time you went to the Gate you came back with _superpowers_. Do you want to risk finding out you’ve got as much energy on tap as the _reactor_ we just broke into? In the middle of a massive, _really populated,_ _foreign_ city? We don’t even know what the laws _are_ here -” 

“What? So we’re just _not gonna use alchemy?”_

“We’re going to _wait_ for _controlled conditions,”_ Al stresses. “To _test things properly._ We don’t even know where we _are,_ and if somebody sees us -” 

Al… has a point. Pretty much everywhere else is way more anal about alchemy than Amestris, and even back home you’re technically _meant_ to have some kind of license to do anything more complicated than like, boil a pot of water. And they did, kind of, just do something a little bit impossible. Or have something impossible done to them. Courtesy of the grinning fucking thing that so comprehensively whupped their lives ass over elbow the last time they tried something even a third this dumb. 

Ed scratches at his collarbone, and immediately stops when the itch turns out to be just be more blood oozing down and also painful as fuck. “Okay,” he says. “Alright. No alchemy. But either I’m gonna have to leave you here, bare-assed in a ditch, while I go try to scrounge up so clothes, which I really don’t wanna do, or you’re gonna have to put the coat on and hope nobody looks too close while we find somewhere to go together.”

Al starts carefully levering himself up onto his knees. “Maybe there’ll be washing lines,” he says doubtfully. “Or… train station lost and founds.” 

Ed frowns as he helps Al up, which due to general wobbliness and a near faint turns into helping Al sit back down again. He’s not sure they’re going to find any washing lines in this kind of city, or at least not anywhere within walking distance. Unattended laundry is not often found on seamless steel skyscrapers. More to the point, it’s not just laundry they need. Al needs rest, and a shower, and medical attention: he’s skin and bone, and Ed’s arm isn’t looking too hot either. And it’s not like they don’t know how to get around in an unfamiliar city, but they don’t speak the language, alchemy _is_ a bad idea right now and if this _is_ Xing they’re already going to stand out even without stumbling around looking for the nearest street shady enough to lead them to a mob doctor. 

Besides. Al _just_ got his body back. He shouldn’t be stuck in some by-the-hour shithole, trying not to catch hepatitis off the bathroom doorknobs. 

Ed narrows his eyes back out at the highrise infestation over the water. One of the closer buildings shouts FOUR SEASONS in letters that have to be ten feet high. He’s pretty sure that’s a hotel: there's one of those in Central, in the shiny corporate bit of downtown south of the government buildings. Ed's never been inside, but he knows it's the type of fancy rich people place with a fountain and uniformed doormen out front. 

Which means it has at least one back entrance and a whole borderline secret network of elevators and passages, because the people who stay in those kinds of places never want to think about the fact that the sheets they sleep on have to be laundered by other humans instead of just magically appearing, hand-spun by fairies, on their beds. It also means there’s good odds a couple of the rooms will be empty, either because there aren’t enough people around with the ready cash to purchase a black market kidney or a penthouse, or because this is a city that caters to the kind of people who could buy out the entire hotel if they wanted, but settle for keeping a suite on retainer. 

They definitely won’t be getting in the front door, but Ed’s been using the back door his whole life. Most of the time even literally. He knows what to do. 

“When Ling was in our country, he broke into places and made other people pay his bills,” Ed says firmly, doing his best to wipe as much blood off his arm as possible. “Now that we're in his, we're gonna do the same thing.” 

Al does not look thrilled by this decisive stroke of tactical planning. “Where are we even going to break in _to?”_

“Who cares?” Ed says, crouching down and motioning for Al to crawl over and piggyback up already. “Grift is grift. Let’s go get you some underwear.” 

Forty minutes later, they escape the horrifying system of cordoned-off pathways around the edge of the construction site. They’d initially tried going cross-country, but after Ed nearly dislocated his _good_ shoulder tripping into a pit about six feet deep, he’d given in and picked his way to the accepted route. The change in landscape is frankly alarming. One minute they’re in a grim tunnel made out of scaffolding and plastic sheeting, lit by bare bulbs; the next, they pop out from behind a corrugated iron fence and into a fucking blizzard of neon and _people_. Since Al’s still pretty much buttcheeks to the wind Ed stashes him back behind the fence, skipping back out alone to get their bearings and half-hoping this is the kind of fun downtown area where people walk around in shredded clothes and their own viscera often enough that it won’t cause a commotion.

It is not. On the whole that’s a good thing, seeing as they’re trying to break into a luxury hotel. Ed could’ve done without being yelled at by a woman in head-to-toe pink lace, or her terrifying little rat-weasel of a dog, but hey, nobody tried to arrest him and he’s got a sense of where they are now. He retrieves Al, and they make a quick circuit round towards the water, where there’s some kind of delicious-smelling food truck park that they definitely can’t go into right now. But right behind that - there’s a loading dock. And it’s open. And there’s people in custodial uniforms, with freight carts and cleaning carts and big mail bins on wheels.

And right by the dock - fuck yes - there’s a series of those granite-walled plant bed type thingies that get built around these steel hellscapes to let rich people pretend they know what parks look like. 

“Okay,” Ed whispers, depositing Al in the thin cluster of corporate-decorative bushes that aren’t exactly ideal cover but are just going to have to do. “I’m gonna sneak in. And grab one of those carts. And then we get _you_ in the cart, and then we go… upstairs.”

“Ed,” Al says very evenly, “this is a bad idea.”

“The last time you said that, I got your body back,” Ed grins over his shoulder, and eels off towards the lights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> al, sitting in the bushes & starting to braid leaves together so that he'll at least have a thong or something to wear when they inevitably get arrested: just another day being an Elric
> 
> ch title once again from swalla bc i’m. Me.


	3. all y’all my type

Roy gets several floors down and into a maintenance hallway before he forgets where he’s going, notices the phone in his hand and remembers, _Riza._ It’s never a bad idea to call Riza, so he puts his back to the wall and vaguely notes that he’s sliding slowly downwards as he dials. 

“Hawkeye.” 

“It’s me,” Roy says. It’s so fucking bright in here. “Hi.” 

Riza doesn’t even hesitate. If _he_ can tell he sounds fucked up, she certainly can. “Where are you?” 

“Dazhen. Hotel.” That’s correct, but not enough, so he adds, “I’m fine.” 

“What happened?” 

“Archer.” She inhales. “Don't worry,” Roy reassures. “I happened right back.” 

There’s the hesitation. “Are you…” 

Roy can’t help but grin, even if it’s slow and sloppy and moves his lips over his teeth in an unpleasantly new way. “Be proud,” he says, head lolling. “For once, I’m ahead of schedule.” 

“Roy.” 

“I’m fine,” he repeats. Then, because it’s really the whole point of all this, he adds, “Hungry.” 

The hesitation here is only very slightly longer. “Chris?” 

“Next call,” Roy promises. 

“Tell her,” Riza orders. “She’s right there, she can bring you - things faster than I can.”

That’s a nice way of saying _you eat people now._ Roy’s never particularly felt one way or another about blood, and if he thinks about the _concept_ now he still doesn’t, but if he remembers that _knowledge,_ those moments of every sense in tandem telling him _warm, alive…_

It’s a blessing these back halls stink of bleach and floor polish. Chris wouldn’t bring him anyone unwilling to go, and it’s not like he’ll be doing damage: anecdotally, getting fed on is a decent high. But call him old fashioned, Roy doesn’t exactly relish the thought of looking at his aunt or Riza or Maes and thinking _yum._

Not that looking at that bellhop felt _yum._ This is beyond any other craving he’s ever had, and it’s so comprehensive it seems to have wiped out all others underneath it. He doesn’t even want booze. 

“Hey,” Roy says, because he can’t not. “Think this’ll cure the alcoholism?” 

“Why not,” Riza says evenly. “I’m sure many meth addicts see a marked decrease in their alcohol consumption. Call your aunt." 

Then she hangs up, leaving Roy phone in hand, plastered to a wall that's about eighty percent scuffmarks down this low, working out how best to have someone for dinner.

Roy stares blankly at the phone screen. It’s still Monday night - just - and that means the bar and club will be closed, which doesn't necessarily mean Chris will be sleeping but does mean it’s her night off. Maybe he should text instead. 

But Chris Mustang lived in Amestris for ten years and raised her brother’s kid as her own, which means she will not hesitate to make his life a misery if he doesn’t inform her properly. He groans. He dials. It rings. 

Chris picks up on an exhale, and it’s like he can see her, bathrobe and slippers and curlers in, elbow propped on the balcony railing and cigarette in hand. “Hello?”

“It’s me,” Roy says. “Hi Auntie.”

It’s like he can feel her eyes narrow, too. “What did you do?”

“You know that thing,” Roy says, sounding awkward and uncomfortable and not only because his gums feel like they’re inverting, “that we thought would happen, only not right away? Well. It. Happened. Just… not like we thought?”

There’s a short pause. “You slept with Maes?” 

Roy doesn’t squawk, though probably only because his vocal chords are busy making a strangled creaking noise. _“Auntie!”_

“I thought he was at that silent yoga retreat with Gracia,” Chris says thoughtfully. 

“He _is!”_

“So why are you calling from a stranger’s phone, if you’re not sneaking off that meditation mountain?” 

_“Because I’m a vampire!”_

“Oh,” Chris says. “Well. A little early, aren’t you?”

“Archer invited me to some meetings,” Roy says, gritting his teeth and immediately regretting it as they give a warning throb; at least it’s waking him up, though that may be the lingering burn of _you slept with Maes?_ “Things escalated.” 

“I see,” Chris says. “You had dinner?” 

“No, I - no. Nothing.” 

“Well. Text me where you are, and I’ll see if I can’t get you something.” 

“I’m not _going_ to sleep with Maes, ever,” Roy is moved to tell her, but she’s already hung up. 

The burn of indignity carries him through texting out the address, even giving him the presence of mind to make it a group and add Riza too. They confirm, and neither are big texters, and Maes’ phone is currently locked in some fucking yoga vault for the insufficiently relaxed, not that he’d be texting him _anyway._ But the result is that he’s left alone, with nothing to focus on but the one fucking bulb in this fluorescent hell that’s got the audacity to flicker. 

The entire hall has that mundane surreality of industrial spaces at night: not occupied but nothing shut down, not dead but not alive. Between the shit lights and the oppressive clanking from the elevator shaft, it has Roy thinking that if this were some shitty horror movie, now would be the part when the monster leaps onscreen. 

Only in this casting, he’s neither pretty young starlet nor handsome survivalist soldier. He doesn’t need to see it in a mirror to feel the changes deepening, a new biology taking hold. With nothing to train his focus on, he starts hearing the electricity in the lights, the dull roar of the industrial air conditioning, the distant pulse of heartbeats just beyond the walls. 

There’s one right nearby. Closer than the rest. 

Scent blooms down the corridor, slow in the indoor HVAC currents but all the more inevitable for it. Blood. _Fresh_ blood. 

He’s on his feet and unsure of how he got there. Slow, his body tells him. Quiet. He turns a corner, feeling like he’s drifting in water instead of staggering like a drunk, into a blind hall with two fire doors, an electrical closet, a scattering of laundry carts. And something alive. 

The corridor, the flickering light, all those peripheral sounds fall away. There’s a skinny outline in front of him, colder than it should be but still pulsing with heat in his vision, shimmering: warm. Alive. It feels like all his senses are fusing, sharpening into a point, coiling him like a spring: there, right there, prey right in front of him. It smells slightly off in a familiar way he can’t quite place, staticky almost, like ozone, not exactly sickly, but that’s secondary information, just metadata compared to the rich, glowing pulse of blood. Blood on its elbows, blood in its hair. Blood on its hands and feet. It’s got its back to him, fussing with the fabric wrapped around it. Has no idea he’s even here. 

He’s not going to bite. He’s not. He can tell this is a person, even strangely proportioned and disheveled and wearing what looks like a towel toga, even lit with the prey halo like a neon sign through his newly-distorted vision. But there’s blood already on it, already on the outside. No biting necessary. 

Roy is just leaning in to lick when a bootheel catches him square in the neck. 

“Get the _fuck_ off,” someone snarls, and Roy, who hit the wall so hard he bounced, topples right off his feet only to get immediately yanked back up by the scruff of his shirt and hurled directly into a waist-high bin of dirty towels. Two things become immediately apparent: whatever predator instincts have been installed in the past six hours do not come with associated instant muscle tone, and he’s left his ignition gloves in his jacket, lying on the bed of the hotel room. His instincts have him flail up into standing, but the knowledge drops him right back again: stay down, play dead, you’re beaten until they come close enough. 

“Al! What the fuck was _that?”_

“I don’t know! He came out of nowhere, I was just getting a towel -” 

“Who the fuck even is this guy?” 

Roy struggles with only minimal exaggeration among the laundry, to get himself at least face up; there’s the squeak of shoes on linoleum, an approach stopping short. “That’s a vampire.” 

“What? How can you tell?” 

"You mean other than the fact I spent six months playing juicebox for Ling? He just tried to lick your elbow. Your bloody elbow. Which, sure, could be another reason for that, but look at him - give us a smile, fucko."

There are two people, lit harsh in the awful fluorescence: a matching pair. The stocky one - who's _covered_ in blood, _so_ much blood all down his right arm - turns to Roy with a look that's downright terrifying. Roy's top lip would’ve curled back on sight if it wasn’t already there, less in response to the demand than to all that _blood_. A lot of it's scabby and dried, but there's a fresh trickle working its way down his bicep, and the smell - his head is swimming like he’s huffing paint fumes, like he’s facedown over a bucket of gasoline. 

“See?” the stocky one says. The blood’s still coming up fresh from his shoulder. His heartbeat is so _strong._ “Fangs like fuck. You ever see a normal person with teeth like…” 

He trails off. Then: “Oh,” he says, in a very different tone of voice. “Shit, he’s _new.”_

_“New?”_

“Like - just got bit, coupla hours old, max. Look, he hasn’t even got claws yet.”

“Claws?” Roy says thickly. He’s going to have _claws?_

The pair stop. “You speak Amestrisan?” 

“You told me to smile,” Roy points out, muzzy.

“Not because I thought you’d _listen,_ you were teeth out already anyway,” the stocky one says, like it’s an argument they’re having. “How are you _talking?”_

“Ling was talking,” the skinny one says.

“Ling got _fed_ like three minutes in. Nobody’s going around lickin’ goddamn elbows if they’re not jonesing or some kinda pervert,” Stocky says, then immediately starts eyeing Roy like he’s deciding then and there that it’s door number two. 

“If he’s just turned,” Skinny says, eyeing Roy too but in a very different way, “where’s the sire?” 

Stocky’s eyes widen. “Oh, _shit.”_

Shit is right, Roy agrees as the pair looks around in alarm, scanning the hallway, though whatever thought might’ve come next is wiped clean by how Stocky steps closer, warm, fresh, loud. “Who bit you? Where are they?”

 _That_ is a bad question, because the answer there is _I won’t speak without my lawyer present._ On the other hand, this man just kicked Roy so hard his feet left the ground, and is not squaring up like that because he seems prepared to take a non-answer. 

"Bathtub," Roy says. That’s. It doesn't really. Not the whole picture, but it’s a good enough answer given he isn't even sure whether he technically has a pulse right now despite the fact that he can feel it on the entire surface of his skin, or maybe it's _their_ pulses battering against him, all that blood just out of reach. He tries again. "Not here. Zhejiang." 

Their faces swim in and out of focus, perfectly timed to the throb in his sinuses, but both of them look more puzzled than rattled. “Where’s Zhejiang?” Stocky says.

Roy starts to frown and immediately regrets it. “Across the bay?” 

“Where’s here?” 

Now Roy’s puzzled too. “Dazhen?”

“Ed,” Skinny says, not looking away from Roy. “Either he got bit and turned loose, or he turned on the sire.”

“Why a bathtub,” Stocky says, almost to himself, and then his eyes snap to Roy’s. “Because they’re dead,” he says, not guessing. “You killed them?”

Roy might be seeing colors he’s pretty sure don’t exist in nature, but it’ll take being more fucked up than this to get him to confess to murder in some random hallway in front of two strangers. He wrinkles his brows together in what he hopes is a face of injured bewilderment instead, though he has to admit the effect is probably ruined by how his sinuses feel full of bees. 

“Well shit,” Stocky says, sounding - appreciative. Looks like innocence didn’t work, but on the other hand - that’s not hostility. “Get bit, bite back I guess. And you didn’t eat ‘em?” 

“Didn’eat anybody,” Roy mutters, which seems a pretty safe bet. His whole face is throbbing now in time with his teeth. "Didn't even _bite_ anybody."

That last bit comes out half snarled, half mopey, like a belligerent toddler. Stocky’s face goes considering, in a worrying kind of way. He swipes a hand down his bleeding shoulder, steps forward - and then sticks it right in Roy’s face, palm out, flat, a fresh red smear right in front of him, so bright and sharp it’s glowing under the lights. 

Roy doesn’t realize he’s moved until he’s stopped short mid-lunge, pain blooming across his scalp. He’s been grabbed by the hair. “Ah-ah,” Stocky says. “Don’t bite.” 

_“Ed.”_

“If he’s gonna flip out, better have it be here and now,” Stocky says, in a voice that thinks itself very reasonable. "Seriously. There’s no people around, I don’t see a security camera, there’s all these towels if shit gets messy. And if he doesn't - he gets a snack to tide him over.” 

And then, talking to Roy again. “Lick.” 

Roy licks. He can’t not. He burns, he _hates_ it, this need beyond his control but he can’t not and it’s horribly, viciously worth it. Color bursts across his tongue; for a moment, there’s nothing else, not even the hand fisted in his hair. 

“See, that’s weird,” Stocky says conversationally, right over Roy. “Not even a nibble? Where’s the frenzy?” 

_“Brother.”_

“It’s there, I assure you,” Roy manages, drawing back as much as the hair grip allows. He needs to focus. 

“See?” the evil little blood dispenser repeats. “That was a whole fucking sentence. This guy’s thinking more than three seconds into his next pigout.” 

Then Stocky’s face goes even more calculating, in an even more worrying way. “You’re staying here,” he says, not a question. “In this swank-ass hotel. Look at those shoes. Those slacks ain’t no maid uniform.” He tips his head to one side. “And you’re all sane and shit.” 

Roy squints through the glow. He certainly doesn’t _feel_ sane. “Nobody’s ever told me that before.” 

Stocky laughs. He also drops Roy’s head, unceremoniously enough to keep Roy from reflexively swiping as he steps away. “Alright. Listen. You’re gonna need a snack about once every three hours for the first two weeks, otherwise you're gonna commit some real messy murder, and I’m gonna call that a bad look for a classy broad like you. So. I can get you a sippy cup and rig myself up with a needle, but you're gonna find it seriously challenging to be within a mile radius of the stash.”

Roy stares, trying to believe that he’s hearing what he thinks he’s hearing: that Stocky here is laying himself out as a dinner plan, as matter-of-fact as a waiter handing over a menu. “So either we're gonna need a second base, or I can just stick by your side until you've evened out a bit,” Stocky continues. “I’d say let’s go with option two, because hey, fresher the better, right? And you look like you can show a guy a nice time. And if you don’t, I’ll roundhouse you again, only this time it’ll knock your teeth down your throat. And growing those back is a _bitch.”_

Then Stocky grins, the halogen glow rippling around him in half promise, half threat. “But if you’re good… you get to snack.” 

Roy evaluates his tactical position. He is flat on his back in a pile of dirty towels, and while he's seen plenty of evidence that vampires - that _he_ \- can come back from injuries that'd land a human in traction for three months, he can already feel a vicious bruise forming where he got kicked. Beyond that dull spot of pain, though, his tongue still feels like it’s glowing, whole head ringing with the taste of blood, and it feels like a hand smoothing down his ragged hackles, putting a gentle gloss on the world. 

He feels sharper, too. Just from that one tiny lick. Like he can form coherent sentences for the first time since he heard the skinny kid's heartbeat.

Of course, what comes out of his mouth is, “Snack?” 

Stocky grins wider. “You bet. But first - my brother needs some food."

Roy considers this. Then he finds his hand - still containing phone - and dials a number he will always know from memory. 

“Tianlong Canteen?” 

“Hi,” Roy says, only slightly slurring. “Do you deliver to Anhe? The Four Seasons? Wonderful. Can I get the dinner share special? Pork ribs. And the crispy whole duck.” The two glowing blonds are staring at him. Then Stocky turns urgently to Skinny and says, “Can you even take solids right now?” 

“And some congee,” Roy says. “And extra white rice. And winter melon duck soup.” That last one's self-interested: if he doesn’t want that, then it’s official, his relationship with eating regular food is at an end. “Paying with card. Thank you." He hangs up.

Then, to the pair in front of him, "They said forty minutes." That's _good_ for this time of night, considering that the kitchen's likely frantic and the traffic will be worse, but still. Forty minutes, trapped in his suite with his own takeout, not allowed to eat. 

"... do you have anything we could use for first aid?" says Skinny, who seems if not less intense then at least politer than the other one. 

“And pants,” Stocky adds, watching Roy with something like fascination. 

Roy lets his phone hand slump back to the towels. “There’s bathrobes in the suite. Spirits in the minibar. Disinfectant. Probably… something at least eighty proof.”

The two exchange another glance. Then they shrug, almost simultaneously, which makes Stocky flinch and Skinny wobble. “Upstairs?” Skinny says.

“Upstairs,” Stocky decides, and reaches out to haul Roy up out of the bin.


	4. if you’re thirsty

They take the stairs back up, which spares Roy from controlling himself in an enclosed space while stuck between two actively bleeding heartbeats but also makes him walk. This takes a while, because it turns out Roy is not the one least steady on his feet: Skinny leans heavily on his brother, heart fluttering even faster and less evenly, walking with his arm around his brother’s waist.

Stocky’s good arm is occupied with Roy’s bicep. It’s ostensibly Roy leading them, seeing as he knows where to find the suite, but Stocky’s grip makes it very clear who’s steering. They have to take frequent breaks, even at their limping pace; Roy would try to preoccupy himself with addressing the security cameras, but these two duck their heads and turn their faces away from them automatically, a detail Roy barely has the processing power to catalogue.

“How’re you feeling?” Stocky says conversationally as they finally stagger their way out onto the right floor. 

“Headache,” Roy grits, which doesn’t adequately convey the grinding sensation taking up the whole front of his face, but frankly, what will. 

“That’d be the nose job,” Stocky says, which makes Roy’s free hand fly up to his cheekbone. Stocky laughs like an asshole. “Don’t worry, it’s all internal,” he says grinningly. “It’s all your sinuses expanding. Gotta make room for all those new scent receptors. Fun, huh?”

Then he drags a hand over his shoulder and sticks it flat in Roy’s face _again,_ blood in his palm like he’s feeding a horse a sugar cube. “Hey, gimme your wallet.”

Roy gives him his wallet. Stocky’s palm is rough under his tongue, calloused, intoxicating; there’s no room for the burn of humiliation, the concern that he’s licking some punk’s unwashed fucking skin. For a moment there’s just blood, and it’s _good._

Stocky promptly hands off the wallet to Skinny while Roy’s still blinking colors off his palate. “The ID is in Xingese,” Skinny reports. “There’s a Bank of Amestris card, though… says R. M. Mustang.”

What a practiced little pair of grifters. “Roy,” Roy says, with impressive dignity considering the circumstances. “And you are…?”

“Fuck damn, so _polite,”_ Stocky says in mock wonder. “I’m Ed, that’s Al, he’s my little brother. Try and lick him again and you’ll be getting express dental surgery like no one’s ever got before.”

Roy can see how that’s a reasonable boundary. “Noted.” 

“Won’t they notice us up here when we didn’t come in via the lobby?” asks Al, with a sidelong glance at the camera at the end of the hall. 

“Place like this, they probably see all kinds of shit,” says Ed unconcernedly. “Just keep your face away. They’re not gonna pay us any attention.”

Al is unimpressed. “I’m barefoot, Ed.”

“So you partied a little too hard. Seriously, the security guy’s probably not even watching the feed, and if he is, some coked up finance bro taking a couple of blond twinks up the back way to his suite isn’t gonna register.”

Roy can’t tell if he feels better or worse about that being true. “Please don’t call me a twink,” Al says, sounding pained. 

“You’re five four and not even a hundred pounds,” Ed says breezily, sounding weirdly pleased about this. “Tough toenails, kiddo.”

“That doesn’t make me a twink, that makes me _malnourished.”_

Somewhere behind the blood gloss, Roy has the horrible thought that _he_ might be the only actual twink here. Ed is practically a cube, minus whatever’s wrong with his arm, and Al is disqualified on account of having to pass through famine victim all the way up to heroin junkie before he can even _see_ twink. 

This is depressing. “I’m too old to be a twink,” Roy mumbles. 

“It’s a state of mind,” says Ed, like he too was mentally bestowing Roy with inveterate twinkhood. “You’re at risk. How far left to your room?”

Not far: there are only a few suites on this floor. Roy tries to marshal the frayed remains of his synapses as he fumbles his room key out of his pocket and tries to make it beep. He doesn’t feel _good,_ but - two licks of blood is apparently enough to take the edge off the need, or at least wipe some of the vaseline glow clouding his mind. He can feel the high on his tongue fading out into something steadier, not quite the desperate pull from before. It’s still incredibly uncomfortable, especially with the scent from Ed’s glistening shoulder pounding against his sandpapered nasal passages, but there’s a faint barrier between him and the raw instinct now. 

Roy doesn’t feel aggressive, or hostile, or even particularly resentful, which he distantly recognizes as odd for a predator now twice teased with food, dangled on his tongue and then yanked out of reach. He mostly just feels sick, and nuts, and viciously aware of the two bodies _right_ next to him. He’s _not_ frenzied. He certainly doesn’t feel _fine,_ but he’s not exactly foaming and biting here. Roy has no idea if this is natural to him or if the full turn just hasn’t hit him that hard yet, but Ed - who is apparently some kind of freak vampire handler - has all but confirmed this is out of the ordinary. Is he going to need to see some kind of vampire doctor? Do those even exist? This is what fucking happens when things go off schedule.

The door beeps. They walk in, and Ed makes an appreciative-approving noise as Al, oddly, ducks, making Roy flinch and glance up at the doorjamb in suspicion. Neither of them seem to notice - they’ve both stopped just inside, apparently caught by the floor to ceiling window onto the aggressively twinkling bay.

It doesn’t last: the door snicks shut behind them with alarming finality and Ed reanimates, walking Roy to the couch like an unruly toddler and sitting him down. For a moment, despite fairly inarguably being the predator here, Roy has the bleak feeling that he’s somehow walked himself into a trap. 

“You just sit tight for a second,” Ed says, casually reinforcing the impression by pressing in on Roy’s clavicle. Then - he takes _Roy’s_ hand, dragging it over the seeping mess of his shoulder and only letting go of Roy’s wrist when he’s left it right in front of his face. “Enjoy!” 

When Roy resurfaces, he sees the two are - casing the suite. Ed is bent over rummaging through the minibar while Al is leaning gingerly against the kitchenette counter and slowly scanning the room, dabbing at his hands with one of his towels. They’re both still pulsing faintly in Roy’s vision, limned with unreal color, but he can tell now that they’re both bronzed and blond, long-haired, though where Ed has a somewhat bedraggled braid Al looks like he dipped his mullet into a garbage disposal. His heartbeat is still much weaker than Ed’s, too fast, thready; it doesn’t match how sharp his eyes are as they tick over the doorways of the suite, the windows, the way Roy’s sitting very still on the couch. 

“O-kay, this should work,” Ed says, rising from the minibar with his hands full of tiny vodka bottles, then spots Roy’s forgotten room service. “Hey, there’s _food!”_

“You don’t know where it’s been,” Al says warningly, which makes Ed pout even if it doesn’t change his trajectory towards the table. “Ed.”

“I’m not, okay? I’ll wait for the restaurant stuff, calm down.” Roy watches him pick up the Tsingtao, however: Ed cracks it, sniffs it, and then shrugs and pounds it back. 

_“Ed.”_

“It’s fluids,” Ed says unconcernedly, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth. “Gotta stay hydrated.” 

“With _alcohol?”_

“S’just beer. C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up.” 

Ed doesn’t wait for a reply, just goes to wrap his arm under his brother’s shoulders and trading back the Tsingtao for the little bottles of vodka. They shuffle off towards the bathroom without even a glance back towards Roy.

He waits until the door whispers shut, then stands and walks into the bedroom as quietly as he can. He scoops his gloves off the bed - what the fuck state of mind he must have been in to leave them there - and examines them for damage, insomuch as that’s possible when his vision seems to be trying new colors on for size. There’s a fleck of dried blood on the back of the left one, and a small smudge of inhuman ash on the palm. The weave of the fabric feels coarser than usual against his fingertips. 

He sticks them in the pocket of his slacks, because as much as he wants to put them on right now for security, reappearing in a pair of dirty, bloody white gloves is not going to do anything to counteract the Weird Pervert image he accidentally created by trying to lick a stranger’s elbow. They don’t need to recognize the circles on the back as alchemical arrays for it to come across as off - though they are more likely to than most: these two are Amestrisan. 

Roy’s just started to frown at that thought when he realizes he can hear Ed and Al talking, clear through the bathroom walls. “Look,” Al’s voice says. “I know you’ve done this before, and that you can handle it, but. We met this guy ten minutes ago. In a stairwell. You don’t have to.”

There’s a brief pause. Then Ed says, “It’s fine.”

There’s another, briefer pause. Then Al says, “Oh, my god.”

_“Al -“_

“You’re into this! This is a, a _thing_ for you -“

“You _knew_ that! This isn’t _news!”_ Ed hisses. “What do you think I was feeding Ling for, outta the charity of my heart?” 

“I thought you were _together,_ not that you’re a straight up _vamp fucker -“_

“Those aren’t _mutually exclusive,_ we - I’m not a _vamp fucker!_ Okay I _was,_ but that was because we were hooking up, not - there’s nothing _wrong_ with it!”

“I’m not saying there’s anything _wrong_ with it, I’m saying, okay I’m saying a couple of things, and one of them is that I don’t want you getting hurt doing something to protect me, and another thing is that I don’t want to know _anything_ about what you’re _into_ like that!”

 _“You_ brought it up!”

“I did _not_ bring - I’m saying we can explore other options! We need to call teacher, and Winry -“

“And what are they gonna be able to do for us all the way out here?” Ed returns. “Al, you’re hurt, and we’re in a city on the other side of the world with _literally_ half a pair of pants between us. We were breaking into a fancy hotel so we could steal their bathrobes and camp out in an empty suite. And then we run into some guy -” Roy hears Al cough disbelievingly “- okay some _vampire_ guy, whatever, who’s down to let us stay in his room for the low low cost of me doing something I really don’t mind doing. Like, c’mon. I let him lick my hand twice and he _gave us his wallet_.” 

Hearing Ed put it like that makes Roy feel pretty pathetic, despite the fact that out of the three people in this suite it’s increasingly clear that he’s only one handling this shitshow with anything in his arsenal besides luck. He consoles himself with the fact that he doesn’t normally hand people his wallet: usually people hand theirs to _him_ , along with enough confidential information to blow up the stock exchange. It’ll be fine. All he has to do is return to the status quo. 

Al makes a couple of inarticulate protesting noises that still manage to convey that he would rather his brother do laps in a piranha pool than play vampire sippy cup. “Just,” says Ed, sounding somewhat less belligerently defensive, “stop making a thing about it, yeah? I swear you made less fuss about me going to jail, and I sure as fuck would rather do this. Besides. He bought us dinner.” 

_“Please_ think with something besides your stomach for once,” Al pleads. 

“What, like my dick?” Ed says teasingly. 

_“Ed.”_

“Okay, okay. You get the door when the food arrives, I gotta go teach this virgin the teeth equivalent of how to use a condom.”

 _“I_ am going to take a bath,” Al says haughtily. “And if you start yelling, I’m knocking down every wall in this suite and packaging mister Roy Mustang into single serve ravioli. And you’d _better_ have pants on if that happens -”

This is followed by some snickering and mild noogie noises. Roy stares blankly down at his own pants. The thought that they’d be coming off at any point in all this did not occur. He doesn’t get aroused to eat dinner, and not when he’s settling in for a good long therapy session with Dr. Vodka either. 

Then again, he supposes it’s been established that this isn’t like any normal craving. 

But, he realizes, Ed and Al are right: this _is_ a sex work encounter, just with the serial numbers filed off, and he needs to treat it as such. He _knows_ how this goes. Payment up front, establish limits, have an exit strategy. And for fluid exchange - if you’re not using a barrier, the very first thing you do after is treat preemptively and get tested as soon as possible. 

Well, he’s paid, the limits here are largely out of his hands and there isn’t an exit strategy on vampirism. 

He’s trying to think his way through whether he needs an actual escape route out a window or something - along with the fact that Al had not sounded at all like he was joking or exaggerating when he said he’d make Roy Ravioli - when Ed thumps back into the main suite. 

The air in here is even stiller than in the hallways, but even the slightest shift from Ed moving through the doorway rolls over Roy like riptide. If he thought he’d been holding it together he was wrong. He feels the fabric of the sofa under his fingers squeak. 

Ed grins like an orca in a penguin sanctuary. “Alrighty then,” he says. “I’m gonna teach you how to bite.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ed, putting neck lingerie on and spritzing on Chanel eau de slaughterhouse: bite the pillow honey i’m going in dry


	5. take a sip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> spoopy month

Roy watches Ed cross the room with anticipation that borders on delirium. Ed seems to have rinsed off some of the grime, judging by the background notes to the blood scent sandblasting Roy’s sinuses - they’ve changed from dirt and engine oil to glycerine and something horribly artificial that might be some marketer’s attempt at cedar. Roy hadn’t even consciously registered that Ed had smelled of anything other than blood before. 

The closer he gets, though, the less Roy can remember he smells of anything else now either. The room around them hazes out into grayscale as Ed, instead of either sitting himself down or offering up a vein, stops a foot in front of Roy and looks at him appraisingly, close enough that Roy feels as though he’s experiencing heavy artillery bombardment. 

His gums burn. He stays very still, grappling with the frankly undignified urge to snatch Ed’s wrists, drag him in, pin him down. Keep him there, exactly where Roy wants him. After all - he’d  _ like _ it. 

But Roy’s managed worse situations than this, and he’s not about to get led around by the fangs by some prison-timing tart who likes to use the supernatural as a party drug. “You know,” Roy says - raising an eyebrow feels like operating heavy machinery, but he manages - “it’s poor form to involve other people in your kinks without their consent.” 

Ed stiffens for a moment. Then his eyes narrow and he leans forward a fraction. “Your hearing’s coming in already?”

That throws Roy for a loop, and not just because Ed leaning in sends a fresh wave of scent over his face. He considers how sharp the brothers’ voices had been through the thick marble walls of the bathroom, how grating the insistent flickering sound of the strip lighting in the service corridor. He concentrates on his surroundings for a moment, cataloguing the gentle splashing sounds, the rippling static from the TV; the heavy, obstinate pulse of a heartbeat not three feet away from him. “It would. Appear so.” 

Ed continues to study him with near-scientific curiosity. “That’s fast. It’s been what, less than twelve hours since you got bit?”

Roy hesitates, but not for long: what he needs is a vampire doctor, but what he’s got is this blood-smeared brat who currently knows more than he does. “Closer to six.” 

Ed’s eyebrows jump, lips puckering in a low whistle as he leans even further in, eyes moving over Roy’s front. “Did you get bit by more than one?” 

“No, I -” Roy stops. Had he? Archer had pinned him down, and he’d tried to buck him off but his assistant had grabbed Roy from behind, and - there’d been pain, mostly, in that sliding, oil-black moment before they’d let him drop to the carpet. The assistant and the lawyer were  _ both  _ vampires. His hand’s at his throat, at the swollen scabs just beneath his collar. “Only one bite.” 

Ed’s frowning. “What the fuck happened, anyway? Vamps don’t turn people by accident.” 

“Wasn’t an accident.” Roy hasn’t exactly had time to come up with a decent explanation for how this happened other than the truth, which is itself indistinct, and while he’s game for a little fluid exchange with Ed that doesn’t mean he’s quite at ‘I am in the middle of a quiet hostile takeover of the vampire cartel that currently controls the entire financial services industry of the eastern hemisphere and thus also the geopolitical action’ levels of trust. “I was in a business meeting.”

Ed’s look is heavy with skepticism. “And where the fuck do  _ you  _ work?” 

Roy tries to think his way to an answer past the haze of instinct and scent. Mostly, people don’t ask what he does. The ones he meets socially size him up and then make a guess - finance, corporate law, trust fund baby. He never corrects them. These days he’s preceded by reputation in his professional circles, and new contacts come to him. “Consultancy.”

“Huh,” says Ed. “Me too. How ‘bout that. Now sit back, arms out - on the couch, yeah, like that.” 

And Ed proceeds to sit in his lap. Sideways, at least, his injured arm going behind Roy’s head, along the back of the couch. He’s  _ heavy, _ the heartbeat thundering, the heat of him like a gentle wash of lava, but now the wound is  _ right  _ there and this close Roy can see the injury is - strange: a ragged seam all around his shoulder, sluggishly weeping clear plasma and red blood. Fresh blood. 

“So here’s the deal,” Ed says, very close and yet very far away. “I’m not running on the full five liters, so we’re gonna take it bits at a time, sippy cup style. Though - hey.” 

There’s a grip in Roy’s hair again: this time at his nape, turning his face up. “Pay attention,” Ed says, not unkindly. “You see that? Yeah you do. My shoulder feels like fifty pounds of fuck no right now. You're gonna help me out.” 

And he draws Roy’s face straight to the wound.

It’s too much, to take the blood right from the source. It’s not enough. It’s  _ hot  _ like this, not some half-congealed smear on a dirty hand, wet, alive, alive. The broken skin is singing under his lips, telling him that everything is right within reach, to open his mouth and make it all better with one easy bite; it’s not good to drink without fangs out, not safe, not right, and anyway this wound is too big, unwieldy, pinging something slightly too unfamiliar to be normal concern despite the siren draw of the blood.

“You think that’s good, wait ‘til you bite,” Ed says conversationally. “This is like, the equivalent of eating half a sandwich you found on the ground.” 

Yes. Bite. Roy doesn’t have to open his mouth very wide at all to slip his fangs in. 

Ed’s breath hisses in sharp - and that’s wrong too - but then the blood comes and there’s just nothing else. It sears going down Roy’s throat, lights up every nerve on the way down, floods through him edge to edge like a reactor engaging, a power grid connecting, a whole system flicking on for the first time. It feels like jetfuel entering his own bloodstream, like being defibrillated with a cattleprod, like every individual neuron was just dipped in cocaine and honey. In one allconsuming roil Roy understands:  _ this  _ is power, and he is going to  _ keep it.  _

This is what the blood does. Everything is very clear and crisp and easy. He knows exactly what he wants and how to get it. Nothing hurts anymore, there’s no confusion, no uncertainty, and if this is how Olivier and Bradley and fucking Archer feel  _ all the time _ then no fucking wonder. 

He can also understand why Ed does this for fun, though as the flare of all his senses dies down to something less acidic he can tell that things still aren’t right here. It’s not the taste - he’s not sure he can even call that sense taste anymore - but the stiffness, the tension in the flesh under his lips. He can feel Ed’s heartbeat on his tongue, too fast, like the ghost of a hummingbird held in his mouth. 

Then what Ed actually  _ said _ filters through, and the concept of floor food melds with the edge of dissatisfaction in Roy’s mouth and serves to pull him off. His mouth does something strange and not entirely under his control for a second - are his fangs  _ retracting? -  _ but then it’s gone, letting him pull off with something that can at least fake dignity. 

He’s nowhere near satiated, but now that ferocious pull is mitigated by the new sharpness in his mind, no longer the drowning center of his attention. He feels alert enough to be critical - he can tell that bite wasn’t  _ good,  _ even if the blood was, but he can’t quite figure out what exactly he needs to change about it. 

Ed isn’t offering any clues. He doesn’t look high, just disgruntled, eyeing Roy with a critical look of his own. “O-kay,” he says, like he’s assessing a kitten that just can’t shit in the litterbox no matter what kind of encouragement. “Let’s try it a different way. Here.” 

And he presents his inner elbow, raising his good arm to Roy’s face. “Here - bite here,” Ed continues. “And then just keep your mouth there for a second, and then the whole feeding thing will kick in.” 

Roy can see the veins; the more he looks the more he can see  _ only  _ the veins, lit so sweetly it’s like they’re glowing from within. It’s the easiest thing in the world to pick up Ed’s arm and ease in a bite. 

This time Ed tenses in pain, not just gasping in, muscles twitching in contraction and that’s - _extremely_ unpleasant on his fangs, bad, _wrong._ Roy feels his own mouth flooding in response, his body moving on its own impulse, shifting his jaw, and he’s - _not_ sucking. The opposite: he’s dosing Ed, injecting something directly into his blood. 

Some part of him flags that what he’s just passed on might be  _ vampirism,  _ but then Ed says “Oh,” and shifts again, starting to tilt. 

Roy finds his hand gripping the back of Ed’s neck, steadying him. “Ah shit,” Ed says, but quietly and like he’s talking through cotton batting. “There it is. You… ah.” 

Not vampirism, Roy thinks, even as he recognizes - he would know. He can feel what a propagation bite would feel like; he knows it the way he knows up and down and right and left. No,  _ this  _ must be the high people talk about. The realization is surface knowledge, complementary only: what he  _ knows  _ is that this is good, this is the correct reaction, and that Ed should have some more.

Roy gives him more. Ed stirs, wounded arm curling in and torso shifting like he wants to turn; Roy makes a coddling sound, dragging his hand down Ed’s back, telling him there’s no need to move: he should relax, be still, be comfortable. Comfortable people don’t struggle. Ed grumbles but stills, and Roy brings him in closer, shifting his grip to support him better as he starts to slump. 

Good. Roy releases the bite, barely caring that reflex has him lapping at the wound, sealing it over. The veins are what’s important now, lighting a path up Ed’s arm, growing stronger, sharper as they approach the heart. Sweeter. But bone is hard, and the heart is enveloped by so much of it, and in any case it’s hardly an ideal bite. Not when the neck is so soft and close. So easy. 

Ed stirs again when Roy kisses him, shaping his mouth to Ed’s carotid, but it’s only to curl closer, his good hand closing on Roy’s tie. That’s good, that’s correct, so Roy takes his time there, kissing up his throat, settling them more comfortably into the couch. Ed’s heartrate has slowed considerably, the pained rippling from before smoothed over with the right kind of bite. He smells of old fear sweat and fresh cement dust, the Tsingtao he’d swallowed, machine oil, ozone. Blood. He’s lax in Roy’s lap, breathing even. Roy opens his mouth again and lets the fangs slip down. 

He drinks. It’s good. 

At some point Ed begins to giggle, then clumsily puts his hand on Roy’s face and starts pushing. It’s surprisingly forceful, enough to make Roy release the bite or risk tearing - and immediately sends Ed toppling backwards, going  _ hee!  _ as his arm bounces off the couch and whacks Roy in the chin. 

The surprise of it - combined with the fact that Ed’s fallen out of immediate reach - is the only thing that stops Roy going right back in. It breaks through the focus enough to make him register that Ed shoved him like that for a reason, and reminds him about the whole... sippy-cup-baby-steps thing. 

He manages to crush down the instinct to move back in and keep going and looks Ed over. He’s sprawled out loose against the throw cushions and definitely looking a little peaky, though his face isn’t ashen and his eyes are bright to the point of glassy.

“Think you hadda ‘nuff,” he slurs out. “Room started goin’... spinnin’.” 

Roy recognizes that yes, that’s a good time to stop, but he’s still being drawn down as if magnetized. He still wants to drink, but more important is to close the bite wound, heal it over, make sure nothing infects or scars and ruins the future taste. He finds himself leaning in again, and Ed seems to understand; he tilts his chin up, letting Roy follow the urge to seal it up. 

The bite is smaller than it felt in his mouth, almost neat, with barely any blood welling up. It doesn’t look anything like what Archer and his bastards had left on Roy’s neck. There’s a weird kind of pride in that, which Roy can’t exactly credit, though he has to admit it’s encouraging that on his first go he’s better at vampiring than Archer was.

Better hope it translates to more than biting. Roy sits up slowly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Ed smiles up at him with the trusting peace of the incredibly stoned. This is very at odds with the way he lifts one booted foot and plants it in a casually threatening way against Roy’s diaphragm. 

Roy’s a bit preoccupied with how he can  _ feel  _ the stain forming - never mind that his shirt is black, this is  _ linen -  _ when the bathroom door slides open, and it registers that the low splashing sounds have been gone for a while. 

Al exits the bathroom, stepping out in no less than four massive white towels and a cloud of steam. His eyes tick from Ed - belly up and still making quiet happy noises - to Roy. Then he taps his palms together, blue plasma arcing briefly as he takes one skeletal hand and presses it to the door behind him. “Mr. Mustang,” he says. “We should talk.” 

The seam of the door turns indistinct, malleable, and  _ that's  _ what Roy smelled earlier, he realises as the door melts into the walls, sealing them all inside. That ozone scent, clinging to Ed. To Al. Alchemy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> succ?

**Author's Note:**

> THERE IS NOW ART FOR THIS FIC!!!!
> 
> [roy in the hall](https://twitter.com/Portmai_art/status/1290829882025377793?s=20)


End file.
